With the proliferation of computing devices such as smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices that have become an integral part of people's daily lives, countless opportunities are presented for users to read and interact with different forms of electronic content. With great ease, a single device can be used as a portal to social media content, personal messaging systems, online discussion groups, web sites, games, productivity software, and more. Much of this accessible content, whether authored by someone who is familiar or unknown to a particular user, may include offensive content such as profane words. Software can be used to redact (or obfuscate) potentially offensive words. Some software performs redaction before the offensive content is served to end users, while some software redacts terms from unfiltered content that is received at an end user's device. For example, an offensive term in a text message may be redacted before being delivered to the recipient, or may be redacted from a received message at the recipient's device before the message is presented to a user. Offensive terms may also be redacted from the output of a speech recognizer. Some redaction systems are configured to delete all instances of an offensive term if the offensive term is found in a pre-defined list of offensive terms.